Netanyahu says he will speak with Lebanon, but Beirut denies it

BeirutThe President of the United States, Donald Trump, has announced that the leaders of Israel and Lebanon, Benjamin Netanyahu and Joseph Aoun, will speak this Thursday for the first time in 34 years, a meeting that was later confirmed by Likud, the party of the Israeli Prime Minister. But a little later Aoun has made it a condition that a ceasefire be agreed before any direct conversation takes place. "The ceasefire that Lebanon demands from Israel would be the natural starting point for any negotiation," he said in a statement.

The first direct contacts between Lebanon and Israel in decades The announcement comes a day after the two countries' envoys to the United States held direct and unusual conversations in Washington, to address the Israeli invasion that began on March 2nd in the context of the United States and Israel's war against Iran. "Trying to get a little air between Israel and Lebanon," Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. "It has been a long time since the two leaders have spoken, like 34 years now. It will happen tomorrow. Fantastic!" he said.

The first direct contacts between Lebanon and Israel in decades come as Beirut remains caught between a still very fragile diplomatic opening and a war that shows no signs of slowing down. The meeting between the envoys in Washington, sponsored by Marco Rubio, made it possible to establish a direct channel between the delegations, but it produced neither a ceasefire, nor a minimum agreement, nor even a roadmap that would allow for a structured process. On the ground, the military sequence has continued its course with new Israeli bombings in southern Lebanon and drone attacks on the Beirut-Saida road, reinforcing the idea that, for the moment, diplomacy and war are advancing on parallel planes.

The war is not only continuing, but it is setting the pace for any progress. Israeli attacks have intensified again, with bombings in southern Lebanon, a new wave of drones over the Beirut-Saida road, and night operations in several southern towns. The human cost continues to rise. Since March 2nd, Lebanese authorities already count more than 2,100 dead. With no changes on the ground or a clear guarantee mechanism, any process remains exposed to a new escalation returning it to square one.

This Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised that his troops would continue attacking Hezbollah and that he had instructed the army to reinforce the security zone in the south of the country. In this zone, as he said in a video statement, the troops are advancing so much that they will soon take the city of Bint Jbeil, the second largest in southern Lebanon. Regarding negotiations, the Israeli leader remains inflexible: "In talks with Lebanon there are two main objectives: the dismantling of Hezbollah and a lasting peace achieved through strength." On Iran, Netanyahu has warned that Israel is "prepared for any scenario" and maintains that they are aligned with the United States, who keep them informed at all times.

For several specialists, the problem is not the will to negotiate, but the very form that the blockade takes. Maha Yahya, from the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, insists that the problem “does not lie solely in the distance between the Lebanese and Israeli positions, but in the absence of internal political conditions in Lebanon”. “The state does not act as a coherent bloc and any move that affects Hezbollah's role activates tensions that immediately limit room for maneuver,” she insists. Along the same lines, though from a different perspective, Bassam Lahoud, a professor at the Lebanese American University (LAU), points out that the main problem is the distance between the negotiation being attempted in Washington and what is happening on the ground. “Negotiations are being conducted as if the situation had stabilized, but the war continues to move, which means that any progress can be quickly undone by a new escalation,” he summarizes.

Hezbollah's role and its disarmament is the point where the process becomes more delicate, as it introduces a variable that is not only military, but deeply political and domestic, and which directly affects the country's internal balance. In this regard, Yahya explains that Hezbollah's disarmament “cannot be understood as a technical or isolated measure, but as a long-term transformation of the Lebanese political system”, which explains why any attempt to accelerate it in the current context tends to generate immediate resistance.

An opportunity with little room

From the environment of President Joseph Aoun and political sectors opposed to Hezbollah, the start of talks in Washington is interpreted as an opportunity to try to curb the military escalation and open a path to stabilization, although no one in Beirut hides that the margin is extremely fragile. At the opposite extreme, Amal and Hezbollah reject the process as it is currently framed and consider it unbalanced from its origin, understanding that it exposes the Lebanese state to concessions without equivalent guarantees, at a time when military pressure on the country continues to increase.

The Druze leader Walid Joumblatt, from a more pragmatic stance, warns that what is decisive is not the format of the meetings in Washington, but the actual ability of the United States to translate them into concrete results, starting with a ceasefire and the implementation of the pending points of the 2024 agreement. At that time, Israel maintained positions in the south despite the truce. And, for his part, the Maronite patriarch Bechara Boutros Rai has also defended the need to move towards a negotiated solution and stop the war, in a country where social, economic, and humanitarian wear and tear accumulates without pause.

Israel comes to these talks with a demand that permeates the entire process: to prevent Hezbollah from maintaining its military capacity on the northern border. Furthermore, a proposal attributed to the Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer suggests reorganizing southern Lebanon into security strips: an area immediately adjacent to the border; another between the border and the Litani River, where military pressure on Hezbollah would be concentrated, and a third further north of the Litani under the control of the Lebanese state. In this scheme, the Israeli withdrawal would be conditioned on progressive changes on the ground.